Posts Tagged ‘functional-programming’

I see this question debated hotly in various forums, so I thought that it was worth addressing. Mostly in the name of dispelling some myths, but also to highlight what I feel are the most crucial foundations of functional programming.

And also because I think that definitions are important. They are central to both how we think and how we communicate.

If you’ve ever worked in a Ruby environment, and especially if you work with the excellent Ruby on Rails framework, then you will probably have seen the emphasis put on convention over configuration.

This philosophy has worked wonders in the Ruby world, but I’m going to argue that it is hitting the limits of it’s usefulness as we engineer more sophisticated applications that need to span across multiple frameworks and tools.

I believe that there is a more important principle that we should adopt. Rather than letting a framework handle everything for us by convention, we should be using higher order techniques from functional programming to explicitly compose our solutions from pluggable building blocks. Let’s call this principle composition over convention.